9/11 Physics: "You Can't Use Common Sense"

[William Seger]

31. Bazant and Zhou's elastic dynamic analysis

The B&Z paper does have an elastic dynamic analysis, by the way. It's relevant to your rebound hypothesis because the only energy that could be dissipated by rebounding is the energy that was stored elastically, before reaching the "yield" point where plastic deformations won't rebound (by definition). B&Z give a rough estimate that the total energy of the top block was 31 times more than the columns could absorb elastically, if all of them were stressed to their maximum elastic limit. Even if all of that energy was dissipated by elastic rebounding, it wouldn't matter to the B&Z calculation of how much energy could be absorbed by plastic deformation -- less than 1/8th of the total energy -- so it does not actually affect the conclusion that collapse was inevitable.